More Bloggings
The second in a two-part series.

Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
February 22, 2002 11:05 a.m.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Derbs are off on a ski vacation for a few days, so this week's postings consist entirely of two blogs I blogged over the weekend. This is the second of the two. I am sorry to blog twice in one week, violating my previous vows on the subject. By way of compensation, and in response to overwhelming public demand, I have put some Derb photographs on my personal web site, under " Photographs."

reader e-mailed in to chide me for supporting capital punishment but opposing torture. Gimme a break. Anglo-Saxon civilization got along just fine for the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries with torture illegal and strongly disapproved of but capital punishment legal and popular, and that's the way I'd like it. Does being hanged, shot, or electrocuted hurt? I bet it does, and I don't mind admitting I hope it does. (Apropos which, by the way, the English magazine New Scientist had a fascinating discussion a few weeks ago about whether decapitation is painful. The consensus among experts was: Yes, it hurts like a bitch, but not for long.) With execution, though, the pain is incidental to the point of the thing; with torture it's the whole point. Could I live with a regime of painless execution? I guess. Could a person who supports torture live with a regime of painless torture? Huh? How do people come up with this stuff? It's like those other people (probably the same people, actually) who tell me I can't disapprove of abortion and approve of capital punishment. The hell you say. What crime has a fetus committed?

Over dinner the other night the kids were talking about "multicultural week" at the local school. Each of them had been assigned to do a little event. Danny: the Mexican hat dance. Nellie: an Irish jig. To amuse Nellie, I sang the following little bit of schoolboy doggerel to the tune of the Irish jig. (Is there more than one? This is the one that, as Isaac Asimov pointed out, scans like "paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde," which is to say, dactylically.)

O'Connor is dead and his brother don't know it.
His brother is dead and O'Connor don't know it.
They're both of them dead, and they're in the same bed,
And sure neither one knows that the other is dead.

For some nine-year-old reason, this seized Nellie's imagination, and she spent the rest of the evening skipping round the house singing it at the top of her voice. Danny, the inquiring mind of the family, wanted to know how these unfortunate Hibernians died. "From drink, I suppose," said Derb, who just can't get the hang of this Political Correctness business. "Shot by British soldiers," riposted Rosie, who still nurses a grudge for the Opium Wars.

Speaking of which, I get regular requests from people who want me to give them a China booklist — a list, that is, of books to get yourself up to speed on China and her culture. I tried making up a list, but it came out rather long — much too long for a regular blog column. I have therefore put it in my website under "Notes ... China Booklist."

There's a plan I want to carry out to impress the importance of gun safety on my kids. Here is the plan.

I shall call both my kids (ages nine and six) down to the basement (unfinished, concrete walls) with the announcement that I'm going to teach them gun safety. I shall then stand them at my work bench and bore them with talk about how they must never, ever touch a gun without permission, if they see a gun lying unattended should call an adult, etc., etc... To the point where they begin to fidget (i.e. approx. 20 seconds).

Then I'll show them my two handguns lying on the bench, waiting (I tell them) to be cleaned. I'll assure them the guns are unloaded. However, I'll warn them that even when you are absolutely sure a gun is unloaded, you must never fool with it, and must never, ever point it at anyone.

While explaining this I shall pick up my revolver and handle it in a manner apparently casual (but in fact carefully rehearsed). I'll add that as well as never pointing a gun at anyone you don't intend to kill, you must also never put your finger on the trigger, except when intending to shoot. At this point I'll "accidentally" press the trigger... firing a single magnum round into a large block of wood set behind my bench for this purpose, backed by concrete wall & solid earth.

The noise will be absolutely deafening, the smoke visible & pungent, the shock effect tremendous. (Neighbors will be pre-warned.) I myself shall act surprised and embarrassed. The kids will run howling from the scene, and will forever afterwards take guns very seriously indeed.

That's the plan. I am sure it will have the required effect. Unfortunately, it has hit one largish snag: Rosie tells me that if I try to implement it, she will divorce me.

I wrote in my INS piece last month about being the only person reading a book among 80 or 90 people in a waiting room. A number of other chronic readers wrote in to share my bafflement. This is genetic, though, or at the very least congenital. As a child I was forbidden to read books at the table. It was, I was told, very bad manners. I therefore read the labels on condiment bottles. This gave me my first encounter with a foreign language. Bottles of HP Sauce — a wonderful mustardy concoction that can be found in every working-class English home — used to have the label printed in both English and French for some reason. I had memorized the French long before taking any formal instruction in that language, and I think can still recite it from memory: "Cette sauce de haute qualité est un mélange spécial d'épices orientales..."

Anyone who writes for the public knows the following rule: You can say anything you like about the president, the governor, or the mayor. You can pour scorn on religion, science, capitalism, socialism, motherhood, or the flag. You can spit at the PLO, the IRA, the Chinese Communist Party, the EU, the U.N., NOW, the AFL-CIO, ACT-UP, Rainbow/PUSH or even, if you are exceptionally brave, the teachers' unions. Nothing much will happen to you. Your house will not be fire-bombed, your car will not be vandalized, your children will not be taunted in the schoolyard. But if you leave a dangling participle, split an infinitive, or attribute an H. L. Mencken quote to Ambrose Bierce — then, get busy stocking up the fallout shelter and set the kids to filling sandbags. Nothing gets people worked up like a slip in grammar or usage.

A few days ago, by way of excusing myself for a misquote, I wrote this in a web piece: "You try being chained to this oar 3 times a week while Goldberg whacks a big drum up on the fo'c'sle and Kathy Lopez strides up and down the aisles brandishing a whip." This drove the language nuts crazy. It turned out, in fact, to be one of those sentences — like that famous passage about the tide in Timon of Athens — that has about as many factual errors in it as actual words, if not more. On a slave galley, the drum was not on the fo'c'sle (where the rowers, who of course faced sternwards, would not be able to see it) but on the poop deck. Since there can only be two oars, left and right, there can only be one aisle... etc., etc. et bloody cetera.

Well, phooey. Much as I like the word "poop," I like "fo'c'sle" a hundred times better. In my galley, the drum is on the fo'c'sle. Why do the rowers need to see it? The point of a drum is to be heard. And my galley has a middle row of seats where fresh slaves are positioned ready to take over a rower's place when he drops from exhaustion and has to be pitched overboard. So there are two aisles. Got it? Now leave me alone to brew up more wild metaphors — or better still, read chapter 12 ("The Language Mavens") in Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct. And when you've done that, check out the list of excuses I'm building up on my website under "Notes ... Correct English."

My assertion that Mike Tyson is not a member of the human race drew some disapproving e-mail. Well, here's one small item of evidence: The actual words Tyson said at that encounter with Lennox Lewis the other week. I have had to asterisk them considerably for display on a family website, but I think I have done this skillfully enough to maintain the essence of what Iron Mike was trying to convey. Remember that these words were uttered in front of a battery of TV cameras and microphones. They were not reported in full in any of the U.S. newspapers I consulted — why is that, I wonder? — but the British and Australian press had them in all their pithy vigor. Responding to a reporter who had shouted out that he, Tyson, should be in a straitjacket, the champ responded thus: "I'll put your mother in a straitjacket, you punk-a** white boy. I'll f*** you in the a** till you love me, f***ot. You're a little white p***y scared of a real man. You wouldn't last two minutes in my world, bitch." I rest my case.